Anyone reading other pages on this site is going to know I live in a pretty rural area that gets long powercuts - so what happened when the cyclone hit? You guessed it. 6 days, 15 hours and 9 minutes - yeah, I counted them all (of course not - I have datalogging to do that for me). But some nearby areas were out of power for a full two weeks.
Communications from the lines company - who's name I'll spare - were lacking, to say the least. I got more info from walking around and finding downed lines in the bush than I did from any of their online communications or social media. The sad thing is that they evidently had some degree of info, back in the control room, because people who called them on the phone got some kind of updates. But they didn't post that info online. So what a surprise it must have been for them that, with no good info accessible, their call centres and social media pages got flooded with annoyed people trying to find out what was going on! Seriously - and this goes for more than just lines companies - just publish accurate, up-to-date info online, and your job is almost done.
Batteries, be they in cell towers, Uninterruptible Power Supplies, or just laptops and devices, quickly dwindled in the face of a week long power outage. Those of us who didn't want to live under a rock with no communications, light, or refrigeration of food, had to turn to other energy sources. Namely, small petrol and diesel generators. Oh the irony, that in a catastrophic weather event that was arguably worsened if not caused by climate change, we were forced to use the most inefficient, dirty, polluting sources of energy that you can even think of. Burning petrol isn't good to begin with, and small generators have nowhere near the level of emissions controls as cars and trucks, so their emissions per unit of power generated will be higher. While the emissions of a few tens of thousands of petrol generators running for a week in NZ won't make much of a dent on the global scale, it is a cruel irony that in times of disaster like this we revert to using the very technology that is at the root of the problem.
I'm not an EV owner but it strikes me that if you were, you'd be really kind of screwed in that situation, with no power for a week, if you need to commute and rely on home charging. Even a larger home generator will struggle to charge an EV at any reasonable rate alongside powering your other home needs, and that nice feeling you might have about owning an EV, that you're doing something good for the environment - that would evaporate and blow away with the fumes from your generator.
The only good solution, really, is having solar panels on-premesis so that you can locally generate at least some of the energy to meet your needs. Sadly, the most common solar installation is of course that without batteries - you just have solar panels on your roof, without any home battery system installed. So, when your power goes out... you're actually screwed. Even on a beautiful sunny day - which we actually had several of in that week following the cyclone - you can't make any use whatsoever of your solar array, because any grid-connected solar array without storage must shut down in a power outage. There are good reasons for it to be so: there is no proper way in a non-storage solar installation to separate your house's electrical system from the grid, so a shutdown is necessary to make sure your power doesn't flow back to the grid during an outage and wreak havoc with damaged equipment or the people trying to fix it. Also, without storage, most solar inverters won't be able to maintain stability of a local 'microgrid' so to speak - they're just not designed to do that. But imagine being an EV owner with solar panels - and then still having to resort to a petrol generator for most of a week in a disaster, after investing in all of that!
Extreme weather is going to get more common. More people are going to adopt EVs. So how do we create a power grid and a society where we can actually survive crises like what NZ has just faced - when we're all going to depend on it EVEN MORE for EVs? It's going to be tricky. My opinion is that investment in more reliable grids, which means better actual equipment on the ground, is crucial. Those who own EVs in remote areas should also consider how they'd manage long power outages, and ideally without using fossil fuels as a backup. Having your own solar installation, with storage, is the solution for the moment. But I think that deregulation and innovation in how people can safely make use of their own grid-connected solar resources - again, likely the most common type of solar installation - and their EVs, is going to be crucial so that people can achieve more for less. Because the biggest barrier to investing in this stuff is how much it costs, and that doesn't go down well when usage of the technology is restricted.
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